What Alix Earle knows about business that many of my Harvard Business School students don’t get

I almost said no. When Alix Earle’s publicist called to ask whether she could come to Harvard Business School—to sit in on my class, be the subject of a case study, and speak to some of the sharpest young minds in business—my first instinct was to decline. I pulled up her Tik Tok. I saw someone having fun, looking glamorous, going to parties. I hung up and called my daughters, and they didn’t hesitate: “Dad, you want her there.” They were right, and I was wrong. And the fact that I was wrong is itself a lesson worth examining. Every year, I ask my students at Harvard Business School a version of the same question: what does it actually take to be a founder? Many of them say some version of “know your customer.” Alix Earle, at 25, said something on my podcast, The Founder Mindset, that landed differently: I am the customer. My students understand that concept analytically. She understood it in her deeply—in years of bad skin days, of products that stung, of feeling like the skincare industry was speaking a language designed to exclude her. That’s not a trivial insight. One of the most persistent mistakes ambitious people make when they’re standing at the edge of a new idea is to defer to someone with more credentials, more years, more institutional weight. They assume that if something were worth doing, someone more qualified would already be doing it. What I’ve seen in truly great entrepreneurs—and what I saw in Alix—is the capacity to resist that logic. Tesla exists because Elon Musk didn’t believe the engineers at GM would electrify the car. Amazon exists because Jeff Bezos didn’t trust that Barnes & Noble would figure out the internet. Founders imagine a world that hasn’t happened yet and refuse to be talked out of it. But there’s something else Alix had that I think gets underappreciated: she’d already built a track record of trusting her judgment under pressure. When she posted that unfilter